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Allan Bernard Temko was a Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic and writer based in San Francisco.
Born in New York City and raised in Weehawken, New Jersey, Temko served as a U.S. Navy officer in World War II, graduated from Columbia University in 1947, and continued his graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. He taught for several years in France and produced a landmark book about the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Notre Dame of Paris, in 1955. He wrote architectural criticism for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1961 to 1993. He also taught city planning and the social sciences at the University of California, Berkeley and California State University, Hayward.
Following Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen's death in 1961, Temko published Eero Saarinen, a critical examination of Saarinen's most famous works from the General Motors Technical Center to the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial and its Gateway Arch, as a volume in George Braziller's Makers of Contemporary Architecture series.
Temko was an activist critic who defended the urban character and texture of San Francisco from, in his words, "a variety of villains: real estate sharks, the construction industry and its unions, venal politicians, bureaucrats, brutal highway engineers, the automobile lobby, and -- in some ways worst of all -- incompetent architects and invertebrate planners who were wrecking the Bay Area before our eyes." One of these villains, an architect named Sandy Walker, famously sued Temko over his 1978 description of Walker's Pier 39 project which began, "Corn. Kitsch. Schlock. Honky-tonk. Dreck. Schmaltz. Merde."
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